DO 7 | Master Your Mind

 

Another mindset episode? Yeah, for sure. It may be tiring to listen to sometimes but that doesn’t change the facts: master your mind, master your life. Now, if you honestly don’t see the connection between mindset mastery and life mastery, you can respectfully stop reading this now. But if your mind is set on achieving that big dream of yours – whether that’s financial freedom or something else – then stick around as we’re going to bring you gold in the next couple of episodes. Join in as our hosts share their thoughts on mindset mastery and life mastery, not as they read it from a book, but as they experienced it real time as entrepreneurs, as a family, and as ordinary folk just like you and me.

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Master Your Mind, Master Your Life

Welcome back to the show. We are going to crush this episode.

This is a powerful topic, so buckle up your seat belts because we’re going to dive right in.

What are we talking about?

We’re going to talk about how to master your mind. This is what my husband says. If anyone decides to share this episode, repost it, subscribe, like or do all the things, you’re going to want to quote him. His infamous age-old wisdom says, “Master your mind. Master your life.” That’s what we’re talking about.

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I may have stolen that from someone else.

Sometimes you say things and I’d be like, “Has someone said that because that’s amazing.” If you ever find someone else said it before, then give them the credit. If not, it’s Travis Gentry.

That’s what you’re supposed to do ultimately. You borrow things from other people that are further ahead of you. That’s exactly what we’re talking about in this episode as far as mastering your mind, which you master life through mastering your mind. It starts up in your head. It’s all in your head first.

I guarantee you that there is 1 of 2 thought processes. There are two mindsets already hearing this right out the gate. It is either someone is sitting there going, “If I hear one more thing about mindset is key and mindset this and mindset that,” you are ready to turn off the episode. Please don’t. Bear with us here. The second person is like, “I don’t see the connection between mindset mastery and life mastery.” It’s the person that’s going, “I am just trying to keep up with life. Have you listened to the news? Do you understand the economy? Do you understand what’s going on in my world? You must not be in reality, Gentrys, because my reality says something very different than having a nice thought to make me feel good.”

I say turn it off with respect that if you are going to have a closed mind, then we’re not going to do anything or say anything to help you open your mind. You have to decide that right now. You have to take that everywhere. In anything that you do or any situation or circumstance, you can look at it and say, “What can I learn from this? How can I grow from this?” As opposed to, “I’m the victim. It happened to me. Poor me once again,” then you stop growing at that moment. You’re probably going to experience it multiple times because there’s something in that experience that you need to learn to get to the next growth.

The good news is no matter where you’re at in your mindset overhaul process, our hope is to give you some inside scoop into how we’ve re-thought this. This is going to be a multi-part series where we unpack not only the concept of mastering your mind and what that means, and you sharing your thoughts, and me sharing my thoughts.

Over the next couple of episodes, we are also going to dive into how we master our minds so that we can have financial resilience. We’re going to talk about mastering our minds so we can approach this from a parenting perspective. This is going to be a series. Let’s do this. First, let’s dive in. I would love to hear from you. With mastering your mindset and thinking better thoughts, when did that go from head to heart for you? It wasn’t just a nice concept or successful people do it, or another video that you could watch on YouTube. When did it click for you and become a way of life?

I’m going to go back. I’ve said it multiple times and I’ll continue to say it. It is the books by Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad, and T. Harv Eker, The Secrets of a Millionaire Mind. It helped me to even think that there’s a different way of thinking. Through that comes my growth and taking myself on. I was like, “I didn’t grow up in the family that they talk about in these books, but what can I do? What can I learn? How can I be better to get to where they talk about in some of these books of these people and what they’ve accomplished financially, but even physically?”

I started to take that over into every area of my life. How do I have the marriage that I want? The marriage that I saw growing up was good with my parents, but how do I have an even better marriage? It can also be in friendship or raising kids. I was raised this way. It wasn’t bad, but how do I be the best dad that I possibly can?

What a person like me would do is I’m ready to go, “That’s great. Tell me the 1-2-3 step guide. I’m ready to take action. I’m ready to do it.” What’s that fine line between mindset and skillset? What’s the 1-2-3 step guide? What is the, “Deal with your mind. Deal with your head trash. Deal with your heart trash. Deal with the things that you need to deal with.” When did you realize, “This is not just a skillset. This is mindset here.”

Ultimately, you have a thought when you read something or you go to a workshop and you’re learning about something. I’ll give you my own example of real estate. When you hear about what they’re talking about and what they’ve accomplished, you have a thought that pops into your head. You can either cultivate that thought and it could potentially not be the right thought. It brings you down, “I can’t have that. I’m not good enough. I can’t afford that. I don’t even know where to start.” It’s all the things.

You can also say, “I’m not where I want to be, but how do I get to where they’re at?” You then say, “They started off somewhere. How do I start to go down that path to get knowledge, strength, and wisdom? How do I surround myself with people that are further ahead than I am?” That was the process for me of understanding that there are people, books, and workshops out there that will help me to reprogram what’s going on in my head. If I don’t have what I want in my life, I don’t have the right tools. I don’t have the right thoughts.

To reprogram those thoughts of fear, lack, scarcity, or whatever thought comes up when there’s something I want to accomplish, what is a new thought that I can replace that with? The hard part sometimes is, how do I get that thought? That’s what you’re asking. You have to go to seek that thought out because there are a lot of different thoughts on the other side too. You have to identify what fits and resonates with me so that I can start to adapt and take on as my own. What is a new thought to help me? Is it going to be the thought that I’m going to have in a year or five years? Potentially not.

When we started out in real estate, doing a deal and making $1,000 was a huge deal. Making $10,000 was a huge deal. Making $50,000 was a big deal. $100,000 was a big deal. It’s like physically working out. You progress. You’ve got to learn the tactics and techniques to understand mentally how I handle this.

Even with that example of going from the mindset of someone who is stoked about $1,000 versus $10,000 versus $50,0000 versus $100,000, what’s interesting and what oftentimes stops us is that we don’t even realize that we have these negative thoughts. It’s like, “I’ll never be enough. I’ll never have enough.” We don’t even realize that we’re captive to our own thoughts. That would, in theory, be step one. Do an awareness check on, “What am thinking?” Think about what you’re thinking about.

What’s interesting is some of us try to jump the gap to start thinking like the $100,000 person when all we feel is the fraud in between. It’s almost like the impostor syndrome because I personally believe, but all of a sudden, I’m trying to think thoughts that my internal belief system about myself hasn’t shifted at all. I have a poverty mindset and mentality. I’m already trying to have a million-dollar mentality, but I haven’t even earned the $1,000 mentality. I don’t even have the mentality to understand how to save money for a rainy day.

What happens is it feels like we jumped the gap. We go to the, “Let’s have the million-dollar mindset,” which I’m not suggesting you don’t get there, but we wonder why we are still making decisions based upon scarcity. I feel like there is a little bit of a continual process of renewing your mind and checking it at each checkpoint along the way to go, “I probably need a different mindset for this space. That one is not serving me anymore. I’m going to probably need to upgrade that again to stay there.”

Maybe it’s in the book or we’ve talked about it a lot where you act your way into a new way of thinking. You have to be around people that have been there. That’s what helps me. In giving my own example of real estate, being around someone that’s already done what we want to do helps tremendously. You can walk alongside them to gain the strength, knowledge, and someone to lean on when you’re having a conversation with a seller and saying, “We’re going to buy your house.” It’s a $230,000 house and you’re like, “Yet, I’m renting. My rent is $500 a month.” That’s mind-blowing. You can’t go out there confidently and say you’re going to buy this house because you don’t own a house. You rent and you have $50 to your name.

Being around someone that's already done what you want to do helps tremendously. You can walk alongside them to gain their strength and knowledge, and have someone to lean on. Share on X

What’s interesting is if we use that as an exercise and surround ourselves with people who have something in a certain area of our lives that we want more like a healthy marriage, financial resilience, a successful business, or whatever it is that we’re in pursuit of. If I look back at our journey in real estate and business coaching, and then some of our epic fails in an intern company and all the different land processes that we’ve done, we’ve done so many things. I was after, “Tell me what they do to be successful,” which isn’t bad. I wanted the plan. I wanted the process map. I wanted all those things.

What I didn’t start doing that I find myself encouraging other people to do is I want to know what they think about that process. How do they think about money? How do they think about their marriage? How do they think about God?” It’s not just what they’re doing that is impactful. It’s how they think about what they’re doing that is impactful. For me, it’s when I decided to go, “If I can understand how they think about that then, in theory, my activity should be a byproduct of a changed thought process.”

If they think, “Here’s how I think about marriage. Here is how I think about money,” and I go, “That’s not what I was originally thinking, but that could probably serve me,” then that thought will stimulate aligned activity. That has been huge for me because I’m an activity girl. I like to do things to the point that even Travis would go, “Did you think about that?” I’m like, “That’s a tricky question there. No.” I’m going so fast that I have had to start to be resilient in my mindset. Now I’m asking a different question. It’s not, “What do I need to do here?” It’s “How do I need to think about this here?”

You tend to be failing forward. I tend to want to analyze it probably too much sometimes. I still take action. It’s probably more controlled than you, but that’s what’s worked for us over the years. We want to challenge each other. At some point, you got to take action. I remember being at a real estate conference. It’s so exciting when you first get into it. You prep business cards and flyers and do all the things, but then you don’t hand them out like you’re undercover.

There’s a point where preparation is important, but it’s also the action, which is going to give you the actual experience that you need. It’s like explaining how to ride a bike to someone for hours. At some point, they’ve got to ride the bike to understand how it feels and their equilibrium. It is the same thing with this. Through the new thoughts that you have, you have to start to take action. That’s where the action leads to a new way of thinking because then it gains some momentum and strength mentally. That’s where it helps, going back to being around someone or a community that is moving forward.

What I’ve experienced and what I’ve seen is that your friends and family or the ones that love you the most are typically the ones that tend to hold you back more often than not. It’s because they’re scared or they had one experience and it didn’t work out. Whatever you’re trying that you’re excited about, they tend to poke holes in it as opposed to saying, “I tried these few things. It didn’t work but try this or this. You can do it.”

The ability to have this mental resilience is also watching the edges. I don’t know why, but this has become so apparent to me watching the kids learn something new in school. It felt more real to me. What we find ourselves doing is these universal always and never. I’m sitting there with Nixon. He’s this little guy in kindergarten. He’s learning his letters.

There are some days that he crushes it. He knows every single sound. The next day, you’re like, “Have I taught you nothing?” He sits down one day and the first thing out of his mouth is, “I will never get this right.” I wasn’t mad at him but I was like, “I will kill that mindset” It was so interesting because what I also didn’t want to do is swing it to the other side and say, “You’re always going to get it right.”

We have to be so careful at this pendulum swing of “I’m never going to have what I want” to “I can have anything I’ve ever dreamed of.” We have to be careful in those because what we’re trying to do is we want no expectations with high standards. If I have this expectation and I’m trying to create this magical world by saying, “I can have whatever I want. I believe in myself. I can achieve great things,” and all these things, that’s awesome.

What’s happening is I’m not developing a standard around women. It is not just about skill, production or manifestation. It’s about truly understanding who I am and what I bring to this world. I’m not perfect. I don’t have it all together, but I’m recognizing my strengths in some of it so I can have a high standard for myself in this situation. I can have a thought process that has high standards for my marriage, my life, my career, and my parenting without being attached to the expectation.

That’s because it brings disappointment.

If I were to say, “I have a standard for our marriage,” which we talk about which is passion and connection, I could start to spin if I don’t show up the right way or you don’t show up the right way. I have this expectation of tonight is going to be incredible, and then it’s not. You’re tired and I’m tired. The kids are doing all the things. I could spiral. Why? It is because I have an expectation. I’m trying to think positive thoughts.

I have an expectation here. My standard and mindset are, “I have a marriage that’s connected and passionate always.” It’s also learning the art of not having these big pendulum-swing mindsets. It’s also understanding what is my standard here that I can live into and detach from the expectations of what’s going on around me. I can keep living in it whether I see it right away or not.

It’s so elementary and basic of being okay with where you’re at. Have a goal and a vision of where you want to go, but don’t put that as your standard for next week.

We have so much to unpack in that statement.

Every master was once a disaster. We were talking about it. As I start this new season, I am adding one more tool to what I’m doing as far as investing. I’m day trading, swing trading, and investing a little bit longer-term too based on market cycles, macroeconomics, and where we’re at. I’m trying to wrap my head and drink out of a fire hose. I see these people that have become my mentors. I’m like, “I know I can do that but I’m not there.” Some of them are younger than me. I’m like, “I could judge that. I should be further ahead. I should know this already and all the things that come along with that.”

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I sit back, and every morning, I’ve taken some time of being present, praying, and understanding, “Here’s where I’m at. Here are the goals that I want to accomplish.” It may take longer than I want it to, but knowing I’m laying a foundation because of what I see some of these guys have accomplished and are accomplishing, I know I can do that too. I don’t have the knowledge, but mentally, I’m not there yet.

You are saying two important things, and all of us could call it something different. This was the point that I wanted us to lean into a little bit. Part of what we don’t understand is where and how we develop mental resiliency. It is in those moments when I can honestly start to hear you lean into this idea of, “I can have what I want, build the business that I want, and have the financial freedom that I want.” I’m not quite there yet, but I’m going to be making decisions based upon I can have what I want today.

Even though I can’t see it, even though I don’t feel it or I don’t feel like it today, resilience is built in the times that you can’t see it, not just the times that you can. That’s what makes this so tricky about this. It is this juxtaposition of learning how to master your mind. You master your mind in the valleys. You master your mind when it’s the hardest. You master your mind when it seems to be dark everywhere even though God was like, “You’re going to be the brightest light to this whole world.” You then wake up and it’s dark. You’re like, “This isn’t working.”

Go back. That’s why the Bible says, “Do not conform to the patterns of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” What does that mean? It means that in the darkest of times, I have to go back to the world that I had, the dream that I had, or the idea of I can have what I want. I’m going to build the mindset in the valley.

Sometimes, that mindset game doesn’t talk about that. They talk about, “Put it on your fridge. Say it a million times. Write it 1,000 times.” I don’t want to say all that. It just didn’t work for me because there was a huge part that was like, “I don’t buy it.” The testing was leading me. The testing was developing the resilience of a mindset that goes, “What do I believe? What will I choose to believe?”

Humility plays a huge part in it. From my own experience, at some point, you get to an age where you think you should know more than you know. I’ve come to the realization that I don’t know a whole lot, so I’m on this journey to gain knowledge from other people. I was listening to something. It was fascinating because it’s like, “How often do you go to a networking event or you go somewhere and you talk 80% of the time as opposed to listening 80% of the time?”

You know what you know, but it brings humility with listening and asking questions. Maybe you already know what they know, but maybe they know someone you need to know or they have some kind of resource, tool, or one nugget or one thing that could change your life. I’ve been there where you go meet with someone. You walk out and you’re like, “That felt awful because I talked the whole time.” I talked about all the things that I knew and know, but I didn’t create space to ask questions and be humble in the moment that I don’t know what I don’t know. I need to ask more questions than talk.

It’s funny you’re using that word. For all of us, there are moments when God drops a different word that’s like, “Run with this.” My word that started to change this was surrender because I was still trying to force my way through this better mindset. I was pushing harder because my thought was, “I should be stronger than this.” To your point, you said, “I don’t know a whole lot. I should know more than this.” Mine is like, “I should be stronger than this.”

I was pushing to the point where I ended up exhausted. I had adrenal fatigue and all those things. My body was like, “Chill out.” It was when I finally surrendered instead of forcing myself upon it. I was like, “Let’s surrender to the truth that I know are truths and trust them.” We hear a lot of these truths like, “Do not be anxious about anything but in everything, trust the Lord.” We hear that, but are we living that? For me, I was like, “I’m not living that.”

It’s that balance. We’ve talked about that too. Faith without work is dead. You have to have faith and you have to let God do what he does. You’ve also got to put your hand to it.

Here’s what’s interesting because if we’re looking at people in general, we generally will do one without as much of the other. We either have our faith people that are praying. While they’re praying, we got our active people that are doing. The faith people are like, “You’re making me tired.” The action people are like, “You are making me tired.” It’s this perfect dance of knowing, “Pray as it depends on God. Act as if it depends on me.” I was acting as if it depended on me. My mindset was developed around that. My whole thought process was like, “This all depends on me,” which is why I was completely burning out. That mindset is around humility and surrender.

What had to happen for you to connect those pieces of, “What I’m doing is not working.” Going back to your mindset of, “I’m going to do it. I’m going to work harder,” and then you got more exhausted that you’re like, “This isn’t working,” at what point were you like, “I got to change that?”

It is when I mentally, emotionally, and spiritually felt, “I am exhausted. I don’t have what it takes to do this.” You said I’m a fail forward. I don’t think I hit rock bottom on paper. We’re only talking a few years ago. It didn’t look like that on paper, but I had come to the end of that mindset. Even to your point earlier of a $1,000 mindset and $10,000 mindset, I had come as far as that mindset would take me. It was like, “Get it,” and I did.

I look at the year after or before. We had traveled the country. We wrote a book. We had our fourth baby. We launched our podcast. We got it. That mindset got me as far as it could. With the next, I remember truly the day I was walking down our farm, not sure I want to still be living there at that point in time. I was feeling exhausted even though it was 90 degrees and it was humid, hot, and all the things. I remember God going, “It is my turn.” I was like, “That’s something that faith people say. That’s something that those people with too much faith and not enough doing say,” but I did.

I’m not trying to bash people that walk in high levels of faith. I’m just saying I had seen a lot of people who weren’t doing anything. They were only praying. It wasn’t until I finally surrendered and said, “God, I’m going to do what I can do and I’m going to make room for you to do the rest.” That was the key. I’m still going to do what I can do. I’m going to find my edge. I’m not going to push past it because I had been pushing past it. I’m going to find my edge. I’m going to watch and make room for you to do the things that I can’t do. That was one of my best years. I was not pushing over past my edge. It was sustainable. It was a shift in going, “That mindset only got me so far.”

Now you’re on this new mindset. This whole episode is about how it never ends fortunately and unfortunately. We’re can talk all day long about this, but the whole mastering your mind. I’m a big believer that once you stop growing, your dead. You have to continually grow and challenge yourself. That looks different depending on your age, where you’re at in life, have kids or no kids, have spouse or no spouse. Whatever that is, it looks different and feels different. You should probably be pursuing things differently. Now you are in a new season within your business of growth in a new way because you hired someone full-time. She’s coming alongside you to get you to where you want to go because you can’t do it alone.

Here’s what’s so interesting. To anyone that’s at a shift in mindset, this is so incredible. You’ll know it because you start to go back and forth. Doubt is not, “I don’t believe.” Doubt is, “I’m undecided in what I believe,” which is different from fear. Fear is you already decided, “I’m scared.” Doubt is, “I’m not sure what I believe.”

This was a couple of months ago. I remember a few mornings in a row when I would go, “What do I have to do here?” I could sense myself going, “This isn’t going to work. I’m going to fail. I’m going to fail forward. I’m going to hurt people. I can’t trust anyone.” All of a sudden, it was like, “Unless I could. What if I did trust people? What if I trusted God, me, Cammy, and all of these people?” It was this like, “What am I going to choose here? I could go with this and I could make all of my decisions based on this.” I could even call it realistic. I could even call it practical. I could wrap this thing up and call it whatever I want to call it, or I could learn the lesson of trust. I could create a mindset of trust. Do I trust this? How could I trust this? What does trust look like?

Growth, in general, takes a level of trust. Now that you hired someone, you are giving some of the day-to-day tasks to someone else to have them do it. You tend to be like, “I’ll do it.” That, in general, is hard for you. You got to the point you needed someone. You’re strengthening yourself with the mindset of, “I’ve got to trust this person or anybody to help me bring this message that I feel like God called me to bring to the world with the book, workbook, and all the things.”

What do you feel is the greatest lesson, now that you’re in the midst of it? We had multiple conversations about hiring someone part-time and full-time. What we do a very good job of is doing a self-audit and a family audit. We’re like, “If you take this risk, it’s an educated risk. What are the potential pros and potential cons? If worst-case happens, what does that look like?”

Some people that may read this are entrepreneurs. You can only do so much. To get to that next level, you have to have someone else, whether it’s a VA, part-time person, full-time person, crew, or whatever that is. You have to have more people. I believe, for the most part, that if God put a dream inside you, it needs other people. It’s not just you because then it’s not a God-sized dream.

I’ll lean into trust. That’s how you start to shift your mindset as you start. I had to ask myself, “What is the woman who has built the dream that I can see in my heart?” This wasn’t just my career. This was my family life too. This was our marriage. This was all of the pieces of the whole puzzle. What does she know that I don’t know yet today? What does she believe that I don’t yet know?

It took me probably a couple of weeks to figure out the word trust. I didn’t know I wasn’t trusting. I was controlling everything. I was holding onto everything. In theory, we could go back to all of my past, but I can’t trust it. I can’t trust you. I can’t trust it. I can’t trust. I had built a world around me that required me. I was at the center of all of it, not because I was narcissistic but because I was afraid of being disappointed or let down.

For me, even when I think about our pair and how we’re growing this business, and you’re going into thinking. I can’t help you with what you’re doing because I don’t even know how to spell half of what you’re talking about. This is the other hard part because you’re like, “You need to learn about trust.” You realize all the areas that you don’t trust. That opens up a whole can of worms because it’s not just in this little piece of the pie of this part of my business. It’s in every area. That’s my mindset right now. What does trust mean? What does it look like? How do you build relationships and trust? How do you work towards trust? What is trust? What kind of boundaries do you set in trust? It’s all of them. It has opened up a whole new world.

We’ve had different partners or different people that we’ve collaborated with. Some were good and some were bad. You can look at that and say, “That’s baggage,” or you can look at that and say, “That’s leverage because I have now the experience of the dos and don’ts.” Most people won’t even get started by hiring someone. We’ve probably hired and stopped and done different things. I’ve done it with VAs and stuff, but every time I do it, I get better. It’s mastering my mind of, “That wasn’t a failure. It was feedback. It gave me some information. Now, I need to do it differently moving forward if I want a different result. The way I did it wasn’t exactly the outcome I was looking for.”

Ultimately, that’s where we’ll land in this episode. We’re going to unpack this in series and take this down different paths. There’s a little bit of a different conversation when we’re talking about money. There’s a little bit of a different conversation when we’re talking about kids. The idea here is there is a part of self-auditing and thinking about what you’re thinking about. It is ultimately simply asking, “Is that thought going to get me to where I’ve never been and where I want to be too?” It could probably take you where you don’t want to go as well.

The idea would be, “That’s interesting. I’m aware of my thoughts. Is that thought going to get me to where I want to go?” It becomes a simple answer. It’s either a yes or a no. It is realizing that the valley in between is designed to build the resilience that you need to master your life because you’ve mastered your mind.

We are going to talk about a couple of different topics. One of them is money and what used to work and may not work moving forward going into 2023.

That’s what I need you to know. Buckle up. You’re not going to want to miss that.

We’re going to throw out some different ideas, tools, and tactics that you can start to implement or learn about. You can then figure out what works for you or may not work for you moving forward. I could pretty much guarantee that it’s going to look different over the next 6 to 9 to 12 months.

We’re also going to be talking about developing and mastering your mind from a parenting and family perspective. All of you know that Travis and I have upgraded to five children. We are going to be sharing some of the things that we are doing and learning. I still, to the end of any sentence, will own the fact that of all the things that we’ve done, I’m most proud of how we’ve done marriage and parenting. We won’t pretend to know it all, but we will share our tips and tricks on how we do that.

Also, how we do it the best that we possibly can with the information and where we’re at, but always looking to grow. As our children are 9 weeks to 8 years old, it is going to look different in 2 to 4 years. We’re continually growing. We are not just looking at where we’re at, but where we’re going. What we want to share with you is what we’ve learned, and then what we’re also doing to prepare as they get older.

We’re also launching our own mastermind groups. This has been a long time coming. There is a video on YouTube. You’ll be able to find this information and dive in. We are going to be launching a year-long mastermind group where we will be putting twelve people in one group and talking about all of these things.

Many principles from my book to the growth coaching that I do, we’re going to put them into a curriculum so that no matter where you are across the country, you can join us as we dig into understanding conflict and how to do it better, talking about vision and how to clarify it, and understanding your own limiting beliefs and the things that stop you.

We’re going to be talking about money. We’re going to be talking about health. We’re going to be talking about all of the things at a very deep intentional level. We want to invite you to join that community. Over the course of the next couple of episodes, we’ll talk a little bit more about that and share some of the wins and testimonials from the people in those groups. Until next time, dream on.

 

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